The Sundering (21 page)

Martinez clapped his hands and made as if to rise. “So! Walpurga’s off the hook?”

Roland snorted out a condescending little laugh. “Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous. I can’t go back on my word to Lord Pierre.”

Martinez gave his brother a long, angry look. Roland held his gaze for a moment, then gave a snort of irritation. “Don’t give me those Command-room eyes—your shoulder boards are too new, and I’m not one of your snotty cadets.”

“I thought we had a deal.”

“Not for Caroline Sula we don’t.” Roland gave his fingernails a fastidious inspection. “The Ngenis are rich, they’re already in place in the Convocation and the ministries, and haven’t lost their influence. Rehabilitating Lady Sula would be a years-long project—it would pay off eventually, but the Ngenis are paying off
now.
” He looked up from his fingernails. “But don’t let me discourage your matrimonial ambitions. Sula’s beautiful and bright, and that’s one more advantage than
you’ve
got.”

“Damn you,” said Martinez. Roland shrugged.

Martinez rose and left the office.

She’s the heir to a title, he thought, and I’m not. And thankfully all my children will be Sulas.

“No,” said Lord Saïd. “That is out of the question. The empire has been ruled from the High City for twelve thousand years, and will for ten million more.”

The Lord Senior’s office, unlike the gloomy board room in the Commandery, was brilliant with light. One transparent wall showed the great granite dome of the Great Refuge, from which the Shaa had ruled their empire, and beyond that a spectacular view of the Lower Town. From his seat Chen could see the private gallery by which Lord Saïd’s predecessors had once traveled to the Great Refuge to receive orders from their masters. But the Great Refuge was closed now, with the death of the last Shaa, and vague plans to make a museum of the place had been ended by the war. The first man in the empire sat before him, comfortably disposed in a huge domed chair with a kind of flaring hood that overshadowed the Lord Senior’s face.

“The High City and the government aren’t the same thing,” Lord Chen said, paraphrasing Martinez’s memorial. “The government can be anywhere—it
should
be somewhere else, where a stray missile can’t wipe it out. Where it won’t be trapped on the planet if the battle goes against us.”

“What is a more glorious death than one in service to the Praxis?” asked Lord Saïd. He was over ninety, with close-cropped white hair and mustache and a beaky nose that age was drawing ever closer to his prominent chin. His clan was known for their fierce conservatism, and he had been placed at the head of the government on the very day of the rebellion, when he had denounced the Naxid Lord Senior from his seat in the Convocation, and led the resistance that had ended with the rebels being flung from the High City to the rocks below.

Chen looked at him. “The government is determined to die, then?” he said.

Saïd seemed a little surprised by Chen’s words. “We are determined to preserve both the capital and the Praxis.” His eyes darkened with thought, and then he said, “I shall tell you a secret, lord convocate, and trust that you shall repeat it to no one. Since almost the very beginning, we have been in communication with the rebel government on Naxas, their so-called Committee for the Salvation of the Praxis.”

Chen stared at the Lord Senior in profound shock. “My lord?” he said.

“The chain of wormhole relay stations between Zanshaa and Magaria has never been cut,” Saïd said. “We can speak to each other if we need to. They have demanded our surrender, and we have refused…officially.”

Something in Saïd’s tone sent a cold waft of suspicion through Chen’s thoughts. “And unofficially?”

“Since the failure at Magaria the Naxids have been contacted by what claims to be a dissident organization within our government. They claim a base of support both within the Convocation and the Fleet. They have been pleading for time while they organize an overthrow of my,” Saïd smiled, “inflexible government. And our false traitors are also using the conduit to feed them false information—for instance that the Fourth Fleet is in a much better state than it actually is, and will be here from Harzapid at any time.”

“And the Naxids believe this?”

The Lord Senior gave a subtle shrug. “They show every sign of belief. We hope to delay long enough to bring reinforcements to Zanshaa.”

“This game is very dangerous, my lord,” Chen said. “You can never be certain who is deceiving who. And they may decide to force the issue by coming anyway.”

Saïd gave a thoughtful nod. “True, lord convocate,” he said. “But what choice do we have?”

Chen left the Lord Senior’s office with his mind on a thoughtful, rolling boil. He was a Peer of the highest caste, and until the previous day he had felt himself ready to meet a Peer’s fate, dying for the Praxis beneath the fire of Naxid antimatter bombs, or with a pistol to his head as Naxid gendarmes broke down the door of the Chen Palace.

If he had thought the situation completely without hope, he would have shot his wife and daughter first, and he would have expected them to show the same indifference to fate as he hoped to display himself.

But that determination had ended the previous afternoon, in the quiet garden amid the scent of lu-doi blossoms, when Martinez had spoken to him, and Chen had seen new possibilities open before him like a flower.

Now, Lord Chen realized, it was possible that his wife and daughter would survive, and that very possibly he would live as well. And in order for this to happen, he would have to convince enough members of his own caste of the virtues of a plan developed by their social inferior.

Mere days ago, he would have laughed at this idea. But that was before he had spoken to Martinez.

He already had a mental list of people to talk to, people both in Saïd’s administration and without it.

He stepped into his own office and told his secretary to contact the first person on the list.

A singer stepped onto the stage. She was dressed in the traditional flounced skirts of the derivoo, her hair was drawn severely into a forward-tilting pile atop her head, and her face was whitened, with a perfect circle of red on each cheek.

The audience fell into an expectant silence. Accompanied only by three musicians, the derivoo began to sing. It was a song of love and longing, and despite her antique appearance the singer’s voice was a wonder, caressing each syllable with the silky care of a languid lover. The singer’s hands, whitened like her face, fluttered in the air like doves, illustrating the words as she sang. At times the singer paused, letting the suspense mount, and Sula found herself holding her breath until the singer released the tension with her voice.

At the end, the applause was ecstatic. Sula had seen derivoo before, but only on video: she hadn’t realized how powerful a live performance could be.

“She’s a wonder, isn’t she?” Martinez said.

“Yes,” Sula agreed. His hand slipped across the table and took hers. His hand was large and warm and not over-moist. On the whole, Sula decided, a good hand.

The singer began again. It was a song about death, a mother pleading with the unknowable for the return of her child. The voice that had formerly caressed now took on a desperate, raw tone of perfect emotional desperation that cut like a razor. By the end of the performance, the singer’s whitened face was furrowed by the track of a single tear.

Sula retrieved her hand to applaud. Listening to the singer was like having her nerves scorched with acid, but for some reason it felt
good.
The songs of mourning and love drew aside the curtains from a charged, elemental fact of the universe, something true and primal and grand. These, the songs said, were death and longing, the unchangeable facts of existence. This, the songs said, was what it meant to be human.

Derivoo was almost wholly a human art. Though one of Terra’s great contributions to imperial civilization was tempered tuning, few of the great composers or performers to make use of this discovery were human. Because the faces of the Daimong were expressionless, their chiming voices communicated all emotion, nuance, and context; they were born into what was essentially a musical environment, and lived in it all their lives. They were capable of enormous brilliance and subtlety in musical interpretation, though their performances were best appreciated in recording: the scent of rotting flesh tended to limit the appeal of concert appearances, and the best place to appreciate one of the magnificent massed Daimong choirs was from far upwind.

Whereas it was generally agreed that the Cree
were
music. Their primitive eye-spots were balanced by the sensitive hearing of their broad ears and the sound-ranging capabilities of their melodious voices. Their personalities tended toward the effervescent side of the spectrum, and the music they created was ideal for expressing joy and delight. The most popular performers and composers tended to be Cree, and even if a song were written or popularized by a member of some other species, it was usually a Cree who recorded the version the worlds thought definitive.

When the musical expression of magnificence, joy, splendor, and dance became a province of other species, the Terrans had been left with tragedy, with the music of loss and sadness. Other species found something fascinating in the Terrans’ straightforward utterance of despair, in standing to face the truths that were unendurable. Even the Shaa approved. They found the idea of tragedy ennobling, and perfectly in tune with their own stern ethic, their own belief that all but their own ideas were transient and mortal…and if people like Lear and Oedipus came to grief, it was only because of an insufficient understanding of the Praxis.

Derivoo was simple—one singer, a few accompanists, and absolute purity of tragic expression. It had none of the Daimongs’ grandeur, or the burbling joy of the Cree. What derivoo possessed was the confrontation of one soul with darkness, a soul resolute in the knowledge that darkness will triumph but willing nevertheless to shout the fact of its existence into the face of the howling cosmic wind.

Sula listened enthralled. The singer’s presence was magnificent, and the musicians knew how to accent her effects without spoiling her simplicity. The urgency of her voice and the purity of her emotion closed on Sula’s heart like a fist. She seemed to hear the words pulsing through a veil of blood. Death, to Sula, was not a stranger.

She had helped to carry
Delhi
’s dead from the scorched control room, crew curled into charred husks that weighed no more than a child, that left a dust of charcoal mortality on her hands.

She had killed two thousand or more Naxids at Magaria.

When she was young she had killed a grown man, had him thrown into a river.

She had once killed an unhappy, confused young girl.

Mortality wove a web through the air around her, warranting that her spark, too, was brief, that she, too, was dust on the hands of fate.

Assured of this, she felt a smile draw itself onto her lips. She knew where she was.

Sula was home.

There was a brilliance in Sula’s face that evening, a rising of color in the cheeks and an unearthly glow in the green eyes. The derivoo had transformed her. Martinez watched in fascination as the singer’s spirit entered Sula, and he was so overcome by the ivory and roses of Sula’s complexion glowing in the soft light of the club that the only reason he failed to fling himself on her and feast with his lips on that perfect countenance was that he was afraid he’d spoil it, that her beautiful trance would be broken….

He didn’t dare kiss her until after they’d left the club, until he felt her shiver in the chill of the night air and he could wrap her in the warmth of his arms and press her lips with his own.

“That was
wonderful,
” she said after a moment. He felt a brief disappointment that she spoke of the derivoo and not his kiss.

“She’s one of the best,” Martinez said. He took her arm and walked with her down the street in the general direction of the funicular. The door of a bar opened and cast a warm glow on the pavement. Music thumped out from clubs.

“You’re cold. Would you like to stop in one of these places and take the chill off?”

“I’m not cold. I’m all right.” She forced a smile. “I don’t want to hear any other music tonight. It wouldn’t measure up.”

She turned to him, the color still high in her face. Her smile was brilliant. Martinez maneuvered her into the recessed doorway of a shop and took her in his arms and kissed her. For a moment he enjoyed the warmth of her breath on his cheek, the softness of her lips, the taste of a citrus-flavored soft drink on her mischievous tongue, and then he drew back. Sandama Twilight whirled in his senses. His heart was beating thickly, to a strange lurching rhythm, and his mind seemed to be lurching as well, incongruous thoughts and impressions flashing from its dim recesses. He forced it into the channel he wanted.

“You know,” he said, “I wasn’t joking when I said I wanted to join your family.”

Her smile was bemused. “I suppose I could arrange to adopt you. Though I hadn’t planned on being a mother quite so young.”

“There’s an easier way I could join,” Martinez said. “We could get married.”

Sula stared at him, pupils wide in her green eyes, and then an expression of suspicion crossed her face. “You’re not joking, are you, captain?”

“N-No.” Martinez fought the stammer that seemed to have suddenly possessed his tongue. “Absolutely not.”

Sula’s face was dazzling in its sudden brilliant splendor. Further words seemed suddenly unnecessary. His lips took their answer from hers.

A moment later, mind whirling, he was walking with her down the street, aware of the idiot’s grin on his face and the bloom of happiness in his chest.

“Your family really thinks this is all right?” Sula asked. Earlier in the evening he’d told her what had happened to Sempronia, banished for loving a man of insufficient rank.

“They’ll have plans for you,” Martinez said. “They’ll want to load you with a few million zeniths and buy you a showcase palace in the High City and a country estate where we can entertain.” He grinned. “And if you
don’t
want any of that, you’ll have to be
very firm
with them.”